A Periegetical Poem from Jacobean New College: Richard Zouche’s The Dove (1613)
In 1613 there appeared in duodecimo a long, unusual poem called The Dove, or Passages of Cosmography, by Richard Zouche, who identified himself on the title-page of the work as a ‘Ciuilian, of New Colledge in OXFORD’. Now a ‘Civilian’ is a student of Roman law (‘civil’, as opposed to the English ‘common’ law), and Zouche was to become one of the most famous civil lawyers of the seventeenth century, the man more responsible than any in contemporary England for codifying civil law into textbooks, and for championing its relevance in an age displaying considerable metropolitan bias against the bookish law of the universities. The Dove, however, is a poem unblemished by its author’s legal trajectory, and is rather a homage to its Greek literary model, the Oikoumenes periegesis or ‘Description of the World’ by Dionysius Periegetes, a poet who had lived most probably at Alexandria in the time of the emperor Hadrian, in the early second century AD. Zouche, when he published his Dove fifteen centuries later, was in his mid-twenties, having arrived in the college in 1607. The normal route through the academe was to take the bachelor of arts degree, four years after matriculation, and then the master of arts three years after that. Those set on law, however, pursued a parallel degree structure, that of the bachelor and doctor of civil law (‘BCL’ and ‘DCL’), and accordingly Zouche took his BCL in 1614 and his DCL three years later. This poem is therefore the work of an undergraduate, and Zouche dedicated this, his first book to his in-law Edward, Baron Zouche, soon to be appointed Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. It was commercially available: the imprint says that it was published ‘for George Norton’, a bookseller who traded near the ‘Temple-barre’ in London. But it survives in such low numbers that I suspect it was a limited edition, and at least partially assisted by the Zouche family.1 As was the fashion, Zouche solicited short poems from his friends to adorn his first solo publication. Such ‘liminary’ verse is always useful for reconstructing friendship groups, and Zouche obtained five such poems, from Thomas Lake, John Harris, Richard Yong, Nicholas Stoughton, and Charles Herbert. Most of these men were New College fellows, and most were connected with the law. Lake had matriculated in 1610, and was the son of Sir Thomas Lake, royal secretary. His uncle was Arthur Lake, the warden of the college. He actually took a BA from nearby Hart Hall in this year, but had already embarked on a legal career, having enrolled as a student of the Middle Temple in 1609. John Harris was a little older, having taken his MA in 1612, and he too was destined for great things, as the future regius professor of Greek, warden of Winchester College, and the biographer of Warden Lake himself. Stoughton was another well- to-do young lawyer, matriculating in the same year as Thomas Lake, and joining the Inner Temple in 1613; both he and Lake served several times as MPs in their maturity. Charles Herbert, who had arrived in the college in 1611, was one of the prominent aristocratic literary family of that name; his famous brothers were George the poet and Edward the philosopher. As Edward Herbert recalled in his extraordinary autobiography: ‘My brother Charles was Fellow of New College, in Oxford, where he died young, after he had given great hopes of himself every way’. 2 Finally, Richard Yong was in one respect the odd one out, as he was a student at Gloucester Hall (refounded in 1714 as Worcester College), having matriculated there in 1610, aged sixteen; he was probably the man of this name who later joined the Inner Temple. Yong also wrote the longest poem, ‘to my dearly affectionate friend’, and, following the language of
1 The Short Title Catalogue identifies the printer as Thomas Snodham. ESTC today recognises only seven copies, and it has always been rare: the Bodleian copy bears a note from 1816 remarking upon a copy offered for the extraordinary sum of fourteen guineas. The poem has been edited with a memoir of Zouche by one of his descendants, Richard Walker of Magdalen College (Oxford, 1839). 2 The Life of Lord Herbert of Cherbury (London, 1887), p. 27l.
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Zouche’s own poem, he—as only Stoughton otherwise did—wrote in English, a point to which I shall return. Zouche’s poem consists of slightly fewer than 150 stanzas of verse, in the popular stanzaic form ABABCC, known as the ‘Venus and Adonis stanza’ after its use by Shakespeare for his poem of that name. It is an unusual choice given the subject matter, for classical poetry on such subjects was usually written in hexameter verse, and modern poets writing vernacular technical or didactic poems tended to adopt rhyming couplets as a kind of modern equivalent. A good example of this form, highly praised by Zouche, is Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas, the sixteenth-century Gascon Huguenot courtier and poet, whose hugely popular poem on the Creation, La Semaine, had been translated into English verse by Josuah Sylvester as the Devine Weekes and Workes (published from 1605). This was a popular work in New College, cleverly alluded to, for instance, in a play that was probably written and performed by the students of the college at around this time, a vernacular adaptation of Plautus’s Captivi with an added romance subplot featuring an old man who makes a hash of a section of the Devine Weekes on what a champion he still is.3 Zouche sequenced his poem as an invocation (‘The Doue’), two preambles (‘The World’, ‘The Earth’), and then three mini-cantos on ‘Asia’, ‘Afrique’, and ‘Europe’ respectively, collectively indeed a ‘Cosmography’ in the contemporary understanding of that term. This is a clear genuflection to his literary model, Dionysius Periegetes, who had structured his poem comparably, and a few words about the reputation of the Oikoumenes periegesis in the period are in order. Dionysius Periegetes (‘Dionysius the Periegete’), often encountered as ‘Dionysius Afer’ (‘the African’) in the early modern period, furnished the renaissance classroom with an ideal text for instruction in the geography needed to read the classics.4 Before (and indeed well after) the editio princeps in Greek appeared in 1512, the text was most commonly encountered in one of its various Latin translations, of which there were at least ten in circulation. New College, for instance, holds a copy of the translation of the sixth-century grammarian Priscian, appended to a 1481 Venetian edition of his works; otherwise the translation probably most frequently encountered is that of the fourth-century writer Rufus Festus Avienus.5 It was the Greek original , however, that was read very widely in sixteenth-century schools and colleges, and some sense of how the poem was approached is provided by another edition held by New College, that of Antwerp, 1553. This was a handy parallel edition, prepared by Marcus Hopper, and presenting a quartet of texts by (pseudo-)Proclus,6 Cleomedes, Aratus, and finally Dionysius ‘Afer’.7 Now the first three of these texts were introductory works to astronomy, the first two being semi-technical accounts in prose, and the third the evergreen versification on the constellations and weather signs by the Hellenistic poet Aratus. Astronomy and geography were paired in the western intellectual tradition, and what Aratus had done for the constellations in the heavens, so Dionysius, some centuries later, did for the places on the Earth. They are frequently encountered paired in curricular lists in the early modern period—the
3 I have edited the surviving fragments of this play in Malone Society Collections XVI (2011). 4 See the article on Dionysius for the Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum series (1960- ) by George B. Parks and F. Edward Cranz (it is in vol. 3), with the Addenda by Dider Marcotte (vol. 10). For the poem itself I refer to Jane Lightfoot’s elegant edition (Oxford, 2014). 5 BT1.1.13, containing sixteenth/seventeenth-century marginal annotations in a variety of different hands throughout. This is the only copy of this edition in Oxford. 6 This ubiquitous text on the sphere is actually an excerpt from the Hellenistic astronomical writer Geminus’s Eisagoge, which itself was only published in 1590 in Altdorf, ultimately from copies of the text supplied by Henry Savile, today among the Savilian MSS in the Bodleian. 7 BT3.179.6, one of only two copies of this edition in Oxford. The text, no edition recoverable, appears in at least two Oxford booklists of this century: see Private Libraries in Renaissance England (
2 New College Notes 10 (2018), no. 5 ISSN 2517-6935 Richard Zouche’s The Dove poet John Milton, for instance, who ran a private academy in London in the 1640s, read both texts with his students, and their twin influence on his later epic poem Paradise Lost is easily felt. Dionysius had found an English translator in 1572, when Thomas Twyne, fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford—one of several scholarly Twynes—published his The Surveye of the World, or Situation of the Earth, so muche as is inhabited. (His son Brian, antiquary and first keeper of Oxford University’s archives, was a friend and colleague of Zouche, and bequeathed his father’s translation to Corpus.) This is a very rare book now, and was aimed, so the translator claimed, not just at ‘students of Geographie’ but also, rather improbably, at actual ‘Saylers’. Twyne’s preface shows that he believed—despite the poet’s own instance that he travelled in his imagination alone8—the tale that Dionysius himself had been sent to travel in the East by the emperor Augustus, and was writing of what he had seen. Twyne’s ‘translation’ probably relied a little too much on a Latin version, and that Twyne did not bother to versify his text shows that for him it was the technical content of this didactic poem that retained value. Far more typical of the poem’s fortuna in seventeenth-century England is a fascinating edition of the original Greek printed in Eton in around 1613 on the Greek press set up there by the Provost, Sir Henry Savile, who was busy printing his landmark (and fabulously costly, at least to Savile) edition in eight folio volumes of the church father John Chrysostom. While the press was in operation, Savile took the opportunity to produce a couple of items more suitable for the classroom, namely Xenophon’s Cyropedia and Dionysius’ Periegesis. A very similar edition of the latter was then printed in Cambridge in 1633, furnishing a bare Greek text, specifically for use once again at Eton. A little later, the antiquary John Aubrey intriguingly recorded a now lost Oxford edition of the poem prepared in the mid-seventeenth century by the Wadham scholar Nicholas Floyd or Lloyd, better known as the reviser of Charles Stephanus’s Dictionarium Historicum, Geographicum, Poeticum: the manuscript was ‘wrote very fair, probably for the Press’, said Aubrey, with a commentary illustrated from 440 ancient and modern authors. Conceivably it lurks in some Oxford library, unrecognised.9 Dionysius commenced his poem with a preliminary description of the world-surrounding Ocean and its dependent waterways, before moving into extended treatments of the landmasses of Africa (‘Libya’), Europe, and Asia. This tripartite distinction was conventional in ancient geography, but Dionysius’ order is not as conventional, as we would expect Europe to come first, then Africa, then Asia.10 Zouche provided a further permutation of this order by starting with not the circle of Ocean but the sphere of the created universe and the sphere of the world within it (‘cosmography’); and then in his periegesis of the continents he gave Asia pride of place, organising the terrestrial vector of his poem by the path of the sun, and naming first of all countries China, a realm probably not known to Dionysius. Moreover Dionysius’ ‘bird’s eye vision’, in the phrase of his modern commentator, is turned by Zouche into the device of actual bird-flight, his Dove, also likened by Zouche in his invocation to the dove of Christianized accounts of Creation, where the third member of the Trinity, ‘o’er the world new-bath’d, did hou’ring fly’. Zouche however remained tied to his model in one important respect: just as Dionysius wrote of three continents, so too did Zouche, despite the fact that this was now geographically out of date. The omission of America, indeed, provided Thomas Lake with the point of his prefaced elegiacs:
Iste tripartitæ liber est Descriptio terræ Et simul ingenij Mappa, typusque tui. Consimilis versu pingatur America, sic tu Ipse, Columba velut Musa, Columbus eris.
8 ἀλλά με Μουσάων φορέει νόος—‘but me the mind of the muses bears aloft’ (715). 9 William Poole, Wadham College Books in the Age of John Wilkins (1614–1672) (Oxford, 2014), p. 55, from John Aubrey, The Natural History and Antiquities of the County of Surrey, 5 vols. (London, 1719), vol. 5, pp. 140-41. 10 See Lightfoot’s commentary to lines 7-8 (p. 263).
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(This three-sectioned book is a description of the Earth And also a map and picture of your wit. Let America be depicted in like verse, and so you Yourself, as your muse is like a dove (columba), shall be Columbus.)
Zouche’s poem is, as we would expect, studded with little verbal reminiscences of its Greek model, e.g. ‘furthest Gades’ translates Dionysius’ repeated ‘ἐσχατόωντα Γάδειρα’ (65, 451). Zouche’s text is in fact somewhat transtemporal, embracing a mixture of ancient and modern geography and history, and Zouche—setting aside his dove’s transatlantic reticence—at least aspired to contemporary relevance. Asia is thus the seat of India, first traversed by Bacchus (Dionysus), and then invaded by Alexander the Great, but also of China, only recently (so Zouche claims) discovered by the Portuguese. Similarly, Persia is identified as once the home of Cyrus, subsequently suffering culturally degeneration, but now once again in a period of unsettlingly vigorous revival—an allusion to the rise of the Savafid dynasty and to the current Shah, Abbas the Great, at the time of Zouche’s poem busy building up his capital and beating up the Ottomans. Again, Zouche was keenly aware that Islam had changed the face of eastern Europe, lamenting the twin disasters of the Holy Land and modern Greece, both in thrall to Turkish tyranny. Zouche’s text also reveals some fairly conventional pieces of undergraduate reading: his comments on Cyrus, for instance, derive from Herodotus’s Histories and Xenophon’s Cyropaedia; and his stanza on King Bladud, the founder of the city of Bath who attempted human flight, is a story from the twelfth-century Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. In order to modernize, however, Zouche enlisted some more recent aids. He will have been familiar with the use of globes: the college kept a pair in the library, ‘Molyneux’ globes, named for their Elizabethan maker Emery Molyneux—on them the voyages of Drake and Cavendish were traced in red and blue lines.11 Zouche must also have consulted a modern atlas for some of his geographical details, and the main contender is that of the famous Netherlandish cartographer Abraham Ortelius (1527-98). This was readily available in the college library in the Antwerp edition of 1584. This fine, vellum-bound book, hand-coloured throughout, had been donated to the college in around 1588 by a quondam fellow, Thomas Martin, author of the first published biography of Wykeham himself.12 The influence of Ortelius’s map on Zouche can be seen, for instance, in the parallelism between Ortelius’s ‘Barbaria’, ‘diuided into foure kingdomes, or, if you like that terme better, foure prouinces: namely, Marroccho, Fesse, Telesine, and Tunete [for ‘Tunis’]’ (translation from the 1608 London edition), and Zouche’s lines:
BARBARIA next, enioyes a milder Sunne; Whose borders sundry kingdomes doe confine, Fez, with Marocco, Tunes, Telesine.
Another example of borrowing from Ortelius is Zouche on the female state of ‘Amazonian Anarchy’ apparently to be found somewhere in inner Africa. Clearly visible on the Ortelius map of Africa, north east of ‘Zanzibar’, also mentioned by Zouche, is the ‘Amazonum regio’, not a detail available either in Dionysius (for his Amazons, see lines 654-57, 773-74, 828) or in Zouche’s major modern prose source, to which we will next turn. But even in these fine details—the Amazons, Zanzibar—Zouche mixes the ancient and the modern. For the African origin of the Amazons is a claim ultimately from the ancient Greek historian Diodorus Siculus,
11 New College Library Through Time (Oxford, 2018), pp. 26-7. Zouche alludes to the voyages of Drake in his critical postscript, ‘To the Reader’, for which see below. 12 See William Poole, ‘The 1588 Donations to New College Library of Thomas Martin, Lawyer and Recusant’, New College Notes 4 (2013), no. 3, p. 7.
4 New College Notes 10 (2018), no. 5 ISSN 2517-6935 Richard Zouche’s The Dove but the story of female rule still persisting somewhere in Africa derives from more recent rumours of such a society, and also stories of the left-handed Amazons of ‘Monomotapa’ (i.e. Mutapa, a kingdom in what is now northern Zimbabwe), the former transmitted by Walter Ralegh, and the latter by the Portuguese explorer Duarte Lopes (1591, English translation 1597).13 As for Zanzibar, Zouche says that there live monstrous folks, some with their heads in their chests, some with one eye, some pygmies—all stories from the classical geographer Solinus. Yet so strong was the contemporary expectation that such beings were to be found on the fringes of the known world that when the trading captain John Lok travelled to Guinea in the mid sixteenth century, he confidently sighted headless men, calling them by the same name as Solinus had, the ‘Blemmyes’—another continuity between classical geographer and modern explorer. Lok’s account was later published by the Elizabethan geographical anthologist Richard Hakluyt, and was available to Zouche, Hakluyt’s book having fairly recently been presented to the college library by, once again, Thomas Martin. Zouche leant on some simpler vernacular textbooks too. One of the most popular such geographical books was (the future Archbishop of Canterbury) George Abbot’s A Briefe Description of the Whole Worlde (London, 1599, many subsequent updated editions). Compare Abbot and Zouche on China, for instance. Dionysius Periegetes had mentioned ‘the barbarous tribes of the Seres’ and their beautiful silk-work, but whether these mysterious people— potentially go-betweens on what was retrospectively called the Silk Road—were the actual Chinese is now doubted.14 Abbot, in contrast, writes:
The people [of China] . . . Osorius describeth by the name of Sine: and calleth their countrie Sinarum regio. This is a fruitfull countrie and yeeldeth great store of ritch commodities as almost any countrye in the worlde. It containeth in it very many seuerall kingdomes, which are absolute Princes in their States. The chiefe cittie in this countrie is called Quinsay, and is described to be of incredible greatnesse, Such a citie as were wont to bee in anntient time in the East: as Babylon, Nilus, and other. This countrie was first discouered by the late nauigation of the Portugals into the East Indies. The people of China are learned almost in all Artes, very skilfull workemen in curious fine workes of all sortes: so that no countrie yeeldeth more precious marchandize then the workemanship of them. They are great souldiers, very politique and craftie, and in respecte thereof, contemning the wits of other vsing a Prouerbe, that all Nations doe see but with one eye: but that themselues haue two. Petrus Mathaeus historiographer to the King of Spaine for the Easterne Indies, doth reporte of them: that they haue had from very auntient time among them: these two things, which we holde to be the miracles of Christendome, and but lately inuented. The one is the vse of guns for their warres, & the other is printing: which they vse not as we do, writing from the left hand vnto the right: or as the Hebrewes, and Sirians; from the right hand vnto the left: but downeward directly: & so their lines at the top to begin againe.
13 Walter Ralegh, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana (London, 1596), p. 23; Duarte Lopes, A Reporte of the Kingdome of Congo, tr. Abraham Hartwell (London, 1597), sigs. *3v-*4r, p. 195; compare Walter Ralegh, The History of the World (London, 1614), part 2, p. 196, for a collection of such stories. These Amazons are not, however, the extraordinary ‘Dahomey Amazons’, an all-female military regiment of the Kingdom of Dahomey, in present-day Benin, the origins of which lay probably a little later in the seventeenth century, in the reign of King Houegbadja (Stanley Alpern, Amazons of Black Sparta: The Women Warriors of Dahomey (New York, 1998)). 14 Dionysius’ ‘Seres’ were almost always equated in the early modern period with the modern Sinæ or Chinenses, but modern scholars are not so sure of the equivalence. See Lightfoot’s note to lines 752b-757 (pp. 429-30).
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And here is Zouch, really just a cento of the passages in bold above:
CHINA her farthest Region in the East, By Portugals to vs discouered late, Is with much Pleasure, and rich Plentie blest, With People, and with Princes fortunate: Yet most procuring wonder doe excell The Cities where her Prince and People dwell.
The skill of Printing and Artillery, Rarest inuentions which these dayes haue seene, (If we beleeue the Fame which thence doth flye) Here in the ancient’st times haue practis’d beene: And sure that People is or should be wise, Which say We see with one, They with both eyes.
A second example is ‘Prester John’, i.e. Presbyter John, the mythical Christian king supposed to be ruling over Ethiopia/Abyssinia, and often appealed to in medieval and early modern times as the saviour-in-waiting of Turk-oppressed Europe. Prester John is the kind of figure that was mentioned in Ortelius, Hakluyt, and Abbot, but Abbot was probably closest to hand and mind when Zouche wrote:
Next, neere those Cynthia’s-kisse-aspiring Hils, Where profuse Nilus hides his Bankrupt-head: Those tawny troopes whose fame all Afrike fils. Vnder great PRAESTER IOHNS conduct are led, By whom the Christian ensignes are retain’d, But with some blots of error fowly stain’d.
For Abbot had written of Prester John with his vast Christian armies, and how ‘Within the dominion of Prester Iohn are the mountaines commonly called Lunæ montes [‘mountains of the moon’; Zouche’s ‘Cynthia’ is the goddess of the moon], where is the first well-spring and rising of the riuer Nylus’; and his previous paragraph had ended, as Zouche does his stanza, with the caution that Prester John’s (Ethiopic) Christianity was heterodox, for instance still retaining the custom of circumcision. Zouche differs from his Greek model in another important way. Dionysius’ world was geometrically orderly: Africa (‘Libya’) forms a kind of half-cone tapering to the west, and Europe, running symmetrically in the north, completes the cone-shape (269-80); in turn Asia’s outline matches the Africa-Europe cone, but this time tapering to the east (620-21). Zouche’s world, even without the Americas, is less orderly, both in shape and in Zouche’s techniques of description. Dionysius’ world was a watery one, surrounded by Ocean, and punctuated by seas and rivers of all kinds. For Zouche, Asia is a landmass comprising separate political units— China, Cathay, 15 Tartary, India, Persia, Asia Minor, and Arabia. Although he does mention bounding seas and waterways, what really interests Zouche is how the political and religious complexion of especially the Near East has changed since antiquity—what marks these lands is the rise of Islam. And just as Zouche’s Asia stretches a little further east than the Asia of his source, so his Africa now extends all the way south to the Cape of Good Hope, and is a continent more of deserts rather than of rivers. But when we arrive in Europe, Zouche turns
15 The notion that China and Cathay were separate realms, the latter to the north of the former, was current (e.g. it is followed by Mercator) until the Jesuit missionaries reported back that these two kingdoms were in fact one and the same; the realisation only entered the cartographic tradition with Martino Martini’s Atlas Sinensis of 1655.
6 New College Notes 10 (2018), no. 5 ISSN 2517-6935 Richard Zouche’s The Dove very markedly back to the waterway as an organising principle, and especially as the poem works its path into western Europe, it becomes increasingly a rather inert catalogue of rivers, for instance:
Downe from the Alps spring Cloud-despising heads, Europes perpetuall well-fill’d Conduits, flow (Whose farre-dispersed moysture all o’er-spreads) The Rhene, the Rhosne, the Danow and the Po, Po and Danow towards the rising Sunne, Sothward the Rhosne, the Rhene doth Northward runne.
Now this is obviously in keeping with his Dionysian model in spirit if not in detail, but it also responds to an indigenous antiquarian tradition of topographical poetry. This had commenced with John Leland’s Cygnea cantio of 1545, a poem, with extensive prose commentary, describing a journey down the Thames from Oxford to Greenwich. More importantly, the prominent poet Michael Drayton (1562-1631) had finally managed to bring to publication in 1612, the year before Zouche’s own poem, his Poly-Olbion, a huge topographical poem in English describing, by following their waterways, the landscape, history, and mythology of early modern England and Wales.16 Zouche’s Dove is like a much shorter version of that project, extended to cover the three continent of the ancients. Zouche certainly concluded his poem in a rather Draytonesque vein, cataloguing the major English cities, with an entire stanza dedicated to Winchester on account of his old school, which has transmuted the town’s old regal (‘Diadem’) distinction into poetic (‘Bayes’):
Old Winchester, the auncient seate of Kings, For vertue, and for valour much renowned, So subiect vnto change are earthly things, In stead of Diadem with Bayes is crowned. Where worthy Wicchams children now mainetaine The fame once known by great king Arthurs traine.
Zouche’s Dove is also notable for its critical postscript, ‘To the Reader’—‘aduenture upon the little Common-weale of my poore thoughts’. This is a miniature essay in the tradition of Philip Sidney’s The Defence of Poesie (1595), arguing for literature as a form of instruction, and defending Sidney’s own pastoral romance Arcadia on these grounds.17 Poetry is pleasing, and hence succeeds with those who have otherwise ‘returned exceeding empty from Systems and Commentaries’.18 Zouche then offers a further distinction pertinent here, between the poetry of Edmund Spenser and that of Du Bartas. As the former is moral and heroic, and provides examples for use and action, so the latter, as natural and divine, is for study and meditation.
16 For the former see James Carley, ‘John Leland’s Cygnea cantio: a Neglected Tudor River Poem’, Humanistica Lovaniensia 32 (1983), pp. 225-241; for the latter, see G. J. Toomer, John Selden: A Life in Scholarship (Oxford, 2009), pp. 108-24, and the Poly-Olbion project at
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Evidently Zouche considered his own poem to belong to this latter category, and his—it must be confessed19—rather unstriking verse is for all that perfectly consistent with his literary theory; this is didactic poetry. One further service Zouche’s poem performs is of some importance for the literary history of the college. In 1639 there appeared in print an old play under the title of The Sophister. This is an allegorical comedy set in the kingdom of Hermenia, and all the characters are named after terms from logic and rhetoric—‘Fallacy’ and ‘Ambiguity’ open the play, and we soon meet ‘Discourse’, ‘Demonstration’, ‘Topicus’, and the rest. The play was published without an author named, but it is obviously a Jacobean text, obviously from Oxford, and obviously written by a young lawyer. There exists a variant text of the play in manuscript (British Library, MS Harley 6869, copied 1631), under the title Fallacy and headed with the initials ‘R Z’, and it is probable that The Sophister is a revised abridgement of Fallacy, which in turn strongly suggests at least one actual performance.20 There is good circumstantial evidence that the play is by Zouche, including several early booksellers’ lists in which it is attributed to a ‘Dr Z’, and my judgement is that it was written not long after Zouche published The Sophister, and should be recognised as that rarest of survivals: a complete play from early modern New College. Now one category of evidence not hitherto employed to secure this attribution is stylistic. For the author of The Sophister/Fallacy has an over-fondness for compound adjectives so pronounced that he clearly considered this a merit of style. Thus in the play we encounter constructions such as ‘oft-false-prooved messenger / Ever to bee suspected lying Fame’, ‘darke, light, burning, black fiery flames of cold Phlegeton’, even ‘Amongst religious, far more glorious / And faire appearing holy Confessors’. And when we turn to The Dove we find, for instance, ‘all-vulgar-breath’d, storme-threatning Ayre’, ‘strange, sky-piercing, flame- resembling spires’, even ‘Kings-stroke-asking rage’. Surely the same man, overwhelmed by the influence of Sylvester’s Du Bartas, where we find similar tricks, wrote all these tortuous lines. Did anyone read Zouche’s poem? As earlier remarked, it survives in such small numbers that the copies themselves tell us little about contemporary reception. But there is one strong indicator of popularity, and one that in itself brought Zouche’s geographical verse to many more readers than the original itself will have reached. This was Peter Heylyn’s standard Oxonian geographical digest, the Microcosmus (1st ed., 1621, many subsequent editions, including eight to 1639), in which Heylyn reproduced stanzas of The Dove on five separate occasions in order to illustrate his narrative.21 Heylyn (1599–1662) lectured on geography in his college, Magdalen, in the period just after he had taken his MA in 1617, and through his textbook, which soon displaced Abbot’s A Briefe Description of the Whole Worlde, Zouche’s verse was read, at least in extract, by generations of undergraduates. It is a pleasing illustration of the fluidity of didactic genres at the time: the textbook influenced the poem, which in turn influenced the next textbook in the subject. My final observation on Zouche’s Dove is that it is in the vernacular, and that this is significant. The versifiers of New College in the Elizabethan period, continuing a habit they had acquired at Winchester College, wrote chiefly in Latin, and even occasionally in Greek. Wykehamists favoured the epigram, but there are some striking longer poems from the late sixteenth century, for instance the Diarium historicopoeticum of Robert Moor (Oxford, 1595), a Latin-verse world history arranged as a calendar, with especial notices of Wykeham’s foundations. Poetic Latinity remained strong in the Jacobean college—we might think of the epigrammatist
19 ‘a silly poem’—the austerity of the legal historian . . . (Daniel R. Coquillette, ‘Legal Ideology and Incorporation III: Reason Regulated—The Post-Restoration English Civilians, 1653-1735’, Boston University Law Review 67 (1987), pp. 289-361, at p. 318). 20 G. C. Moore Smith, ‘R. Zouche and the Plays “The Sophister” and “Fallacy”’, Notes & Queries, XI, 10 (1914), pp. 287-88. 21 Peter Heylyn, Microcosmus, or a Little Description of the Great World (Oxford, 1621), pp. 83 (stanza on Italy), 210 (Athens), 357 (China), 377 (Numidia), 279 (‘land of Negros’).
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John Reynolds, for instance, continuing in the tradition of the most famous of all Neo-Latin epigrammatists, John Owen of New College; but now we start to encounter more and more verse being written and published in English. Zouche was a younger contemporary of John Heath, for instance, whose Two Centuries of Epigrammes (1610) favoured the vernacular, again following in the footsteps of the notorious, pioneering Thomas Bastard in his Chrestoleros of 1598. (Bastard had been expelled from the college for libellous verse in 1591.) Zouche himself was a bilingual poet, and examples of his Latin verse survive, from an early Winchester piece of c. 1600 to salute a prospective visit of Elizabeth I (it never happened), right up to some verse to celebrate the Restoration in 1660.22 But his one play and his major poem are in English,23 and signal a turning-point of sorts. We can gesture to later classicising texts produced by fellows, such as John Ailmer’s Greek Musæ Sacræ of 1652, or even the eighteenth-century lawyer William Dobson’s Latin hexameter Paradise Lost (2 vols. 1750, 1753). But they are no longer typical, and Oxford student verse miscellanies of the Jacobean and Caroline periods came quickly to be dominated, though rarely entirely, by poems in English.
William Poole Fellow Librarian
22 The earliest may be found in Bodleian, MS Lat. misc. e. 23, fol. 19v; the latest in Britannia Rediviva (Oxford, 1660), sig. A3v. 23 I accept too the attribution to Zouche of the poem ‘Upon the Burning of a School’: see ‘Fun with Grammar: Richard Zouche’s “Upon the Burning of a School”’, New College Notes 3 (2013), no. 10; it survives in at least eighteen manuscript copies.
9 New College Notes 10 (2018), no. 5 ISSN 2517-6935